Untitled

The output is a life-size figurative sculpture, produced as a publicly-funded commission for Edinburgh Art Festival, 2016, an annual city-wide festival of international contemporary art. It was made by carving into a section of a 19th century marble statue to alter its shape by replacing the torso with movable, interlinking forms. This intervention rendered the statue unstable, leaving it intact and upright but shifted into a new posture. The work is one of a series of deconstructions of neoclassical sculpture that Owen has made over the past five years. For the duration of the festival, the work was exhibited inside the Burns Monument, a neoclassical temple on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill. It received an audience of 13,058 people. The sculpture was subsequently exhibited at Frieze London, 2016, where it was acquired for the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. It was exhibited in the NGV Triennial 2017–2018, with an audience of 1,231,742 people.